

l!70 



7 



THE OllGANIZATION OF HIGH SCHOOLS. 



AN ADDRESS 



EErOKE THE 



STJB-OOMMITTEE 



BOSTON SCHOOL BOARD, 



APPOINTED TO CONSIDER TME SUBJECT 
OF A REORGANIZATION OF THE BOSTON HIGH SCHOOLS. 



BY V/. P. ATKINSON, 

Professor of English Literature in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 



BOSTON: 

ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, U SCHOOL STREET. 

1870. 






^^IDXDI=!.ESS 



PROF. W. P. ATKINSON 



I had the privilege of hearing only the closing remarks, Mr. 
Chairman, of the young gentleman who has just sat down, and I 
cannot better begin what I have to say on the subject, than 
by giving the feeling which those remarks, so far as I have 
heard them, occasioned in me. I felt very much as I 
listened to his argument, as if I were listening to an earnest 
plea in behalf of the establishment of a manufactory of bows 
and arrows in these days of Sharp's rifles and six-shooting 
revolvers. No less preposterous, though I may have misun- 
derstood him, appears to me to be an argument in this year of 
our Lord, 1869, in favor of basing the liberal education of 
the public High School of Boston mainly or wholly upon the 
study of the dead languages of Greece and Rome. The intrinsic 
value of those languages in their proper place and time is but a 
small pai't of the question before us. The question before us to- 
night is in regard to the proper course of study for a particular 
class of schools, not the question of the abstract merit of the 
classics. My own opinion is that if any instruments of mental 
culture are preeminently unsuited to the purpose we have in view, 
that is to say, the mental training of this class of pupils, it is pre- 
cisely those, the employment of which the young gentleman has 
been so fervently advocating. In my view the reason why our 
High Schools have to so large an extent failed to meet the wants 
of the community, has been precisely that heretofore they have de- 
pended so much on these instrumentalities. The change which 



before all others I would advocate^, would be, not to drop them 
entirely from our High School course of study, but to place them 
where they belong, in a position wholly subordinate to those more 
important studies required by the majority of the pupils, and the 
demands of the community and the age in which we live. 

I believe it may safely be affirmed in the first place, that the 
old plea that the study of the Greek and Roman classics has a 
certain mysterious disciplinary value for the mind beyond that of 
any other studies, so that they are to be used as a sort of prelim- 
inary whetstone to sharpen all boys' wits upon before they can suc- 
cessfully begin those other studies which are to be at the foundation 
of their life-work, — I believe that this educational theory may now 
be ranked among exploded superstitions.* Every study, it is now 
beginning to be seen, is a mental discipline just so far as it is pur- 
sued thoroughly and by proper scientific methods ; and it is begin- 
ning to be seen, further, that the study of the classics themselves, 
if pursued as they usually are in our schools, by most bungling 
and unscientific methods, has been furnishing one of the worst 
systems of mental discipline that ever was devised, when we take 
into view the mental wants of its recipients, the hundreds of 
3^oung men who have heretofore received this pretence of a liberal 
education. Without denying, therefore, that when properly studied 
the languages of Greece and Rome may furnish the foundation for 
a liberal education, the two questions we have to ask ourselves 
are : first, whether as usually studied among us they do furnish a 
liberal education at all, and secondly, whether, even if studied in 
better ways and to better purpose, they would furnish the liberal 
education best suited to the wants of the majority of lads attend- 
ing the public High Schools of Boston. 

I will pass by the first question with the simple remark that I 
think that the classical instruction of America, taken at its actual 
average, and viewed in its actual results, furnishes simply an 
example of wasted time, and misdirected energy. The average 
classical education of American boys is shallow, superficial, and 

* See this point well handled in Prof. D'Arcy Thompson's wise and 
witty little book, " The Day-Dreams of a Schoohnaster." 



i' 30, oJi 



unsound, for it is merely a cramming to meet the exigencies 
of a college entrance examination. It is conducted by teachers 
who are not themselves, as a rule, in any sense good classical schol- 
ars ; it is pursued by the boys with no hearty living interest in 
their work, but simply under the artificial stimulus of fear of an 
arbitrary examination ; it is abandoned when that stimulus ceases 
to act, leaving no fruit of sound or valuable knowledge behind it. 
The classical education of vast numbers df our college boys is a 
transparent sham. I should be almost afraid to give my opinion 
as to the per-cent of real classical scholars who are the onlj^ fruit 
of so much wasted time and opportunity. 

These facts in regard to our so-called classical education are so 
patent that I imagine they will hardly be disputed. If it were not 
for that prevalent superstition I just mentioned, that in spite of its 
notorious failure in producing real fruit, ihere is yet some sort 
of mysterious disciplinary value in all this abortive labor, they 
would long ago have challenged the attention of a community not 
very tolerant of useless work. Their existence to-day, and the hold 
the system has upon the community, are a striking evidence of the 
power of old tradition in maintaining an antiquated method long 
after it has ceased to have any real efficiency. I think the time is 
coming when it will appear amazing and almost bej'ond belief, that 
in this age and this nation, the only road to admission to our highest 
seminaries of learning, was through an absolute devotion dui'ing 
six or more of the best years of boyish life to so barren a stud}^ 
of two dead languages of antiquity ; while young men were freely 
admitted in absolute ignorance, so far as school preparation was 
concerned or college examination had influence, of everything that 
constitutes the real knowledge of the nineteenth century. We 
have a noble language and a noble literature of our own, and they 
are not examined in these, and consequently arrive at the age of 
seventeen with a most contemptible and inadequate knowledge of 
their mother tongue. A vast domain of scientific knowledge has 
been conquered and annexed to the world's wisdom, since the 
time when Greek and Latin were almost its sole representatives ; 
they are not examined in it, and consequently they arrive at the 
age of seventeen with almost no knowledge of that; so that just 



4 

as Gibbon said in his day, that " a finished scholar may emerge 
from the head of "Westminster or Eton, in total ignorance of the 
business and conversation of English gentlemen in the latter end 
of the eighteenth century," it may be said of college preparation in 
our day that a young man may enter an American college at the 
age of seventeen in almost total ignorance, so far as his school is 
concerned, of everything which will fit him for the duties of an 
"^ American citizen in the middle of the nineteenth century. 

If the evil were confined to the small minority of our young 
men who enter our colleges, it would be bad enough ; but its influ- 
ence extends far more widely. It perverts our whole public school 
system. Notwithstanding the fact that at any given time it is only 
a very small percentage of the pupils of one sex in any given 
High School who are preparing for college, the whole course of study 
of that High School is adjusted to meet their wants. The best 
energies of the best teacher are usually consumed in their instruc- 
tion, and the teacher has been selected with special reference to 
that work, and being himself the product of the system, is quite 
unfitted for any other ; so that the wants of the great mass of the 
pupils are postponed, and their instruction left in inferior hands. 
If the city is, like your own, large enough to maintain two schools, 
such is the prestige of the classical course, that a merely English 
school is looked upon as of quite inferior value, the term liberal is 
denied it, and the chief function of the school is supposed to be to 
furnish boys with a sufficient knowledge of geography, arithmetic 
and book-keeping to make good candidates for the counting-room. 
"Whatever higher discipline there is, comes exclusively in the hard 
dry form of abstract mathematics. 

This state of things is the more absurd inasmuch as the college 
boy, though put through this pedantic antiquated drill all through 
the best years of his boyhood, in order merely to gain admission to 
college, finds after his admission that a modern spirit has penetrated 
our best colleges. He then has a free choice given him between 
classical learning, and the pursuit of many branches of modern 
science and modern literature ; but when he turns eagerlj^ as the 
whole spirit of modern life leads him to turn, to those sciences 
and literatures, he has to sigh in vain for the precious years 



of boyhood now gone by, in which he might have laid the 
proper foundation for such knowledge. He finds himself with 
senses untrained, with habits of inductive reasoning to be be- 
gun, ignorant of his mother tongue, with all the foundations yet to 
be laid. He finds himself a man in years, and a child in English 
and scientific training. What wonder that he so often goes back 
in despair to his Latin and Greek vocables of which he does know 
a little, and thus furnishes, in his disgust at unfamiliar studies, a 
cheap triumph to the pedant. 

I maintain that from beginning to end, Mr. Chairman,, this is 
all wrong, and that so long as we continue the efibrt to base a liberal 
American education solely on the Greek and Latin languages, we 
shall have the same melancholy failure. For the higher American 
education thus far is a failure, inasmuch as, considered as a system, 
it produces neither good scholars nor good scientific men. Our good 
scholars are few and far between, and our men of science and our 
men of practice are self-educated. The glory of our American 
system thus far is that it teaches all the people to read and write.* 
That is a great glory and I would not disparage it ; but the time 
has come when we need something more, and I maintain that for 
the majority of our young people that is absolutely not to be found 
in the direction of an exclusive study of Latin and Greek, but in 
quite another direction. That we shall still need classical scholars 
I cheerfully admit. So we shall still need Hebrew and Chaldee 
and Sanskrit scholars. So we shall have, I hope, students of the 
Eskimo dialects and the languages of New Mexico. But Ameri- 
can popular education will never be based on the study of 
Eskimo. As little, in my opinion, can it be based on the study 

* A writer in a recent number of the English Saturday Beview, discussing 
the subject of English popular education, says : " No one can have the 
most superficial acquaintance with the mental condition of our large mid- 
dle classes, without perceiving a great and widening gulf which separates 
reading from education. Academies and the three Rs have achieved at 
least the very definite " results " of showing that the outside and merely 
mechanical appliances of education may be brought to a very respectable 
degree of perfection without any corresponding development of intellectual 
power." A better description could hardly be given of the fatal weakness 
of our present methods of public school instruction. 



6 



of Greek, however wide apart those two languages may be in point 
of absolute value. 

In saying this I am by no means arguing as the advocate of 
what is called a utilitarian as contradistinguished from a liberal 
education, I distinctly recognize the existence of an ideal liberal 
education as the prefer aim of all our educational efforts. The 
question for me is, what constitute the proper ingredients of that 
ideal liberal education for an American in this nineteenth century ? 
If we can answer that we shall have a clew to guide us in laying 
out a course of study for a Boston High School. 

Now in regard to this phrase, liberal education, I lay down two 
principles, — that its essence does not consist in the mere capacity' 
to utter any shibboleth, whether Greek, Latin or Hebrew, but that 
the essence of liberal education consists in symmetrical mental 
development. Any course of study that gives that is a liberal 
course of study ; any course that does not is illiberal ; and so far 
from its being the peculiar monopoly of any particular course, 
many courses or sets of studies, mingled in many various propor- 
tions, can give it — proportions to be varied according to special 
circumstances and wants and occasions. For, further, I maintain 
that though a course or method of study may be useful which is 
not liberal, no course of study can be liberal which is not useful, — 
useful not in the narrow, but in the high and noble sense of that 
much-abused word ; and accordingly I find that the most illiberally 
educated of all men is a classical pedant, for of all men he is the 
most useless. 

But when we have once admitted this idea of usefulness even 
into our idea of a liberal education, instead of stigmatizing it as 
" mere utilitarianism," we have to ask ourselves " useful for 
what ? " And I answer that the aim of an American education 
system should be to make a generation of liberally educated Amer- 
ican citizens, men and likewise women ; men and women, that is, 
equipped with the knowledge of the nineteenth century, and not of 
the ninth ; to act the part of free, intelligent, self-governing human 
beings, and to do the work which their couutr}' and generation 
set before them. There is no absolute ideal education, good for 
all times and places. You want a live man or woman as the pro- 



duct of your education, not an abstraction, nor a member of an 
idle cultivated " class." The very idea of a higher education in 
this country must be something that all can aspire to, though the 
time may never arrive when all shall reach it. The idea at the 
foundation of a classical education is an exclusive idea, — it is a 
class education. Now the theory of our institutions admits of no 
such idea as that of an idle, or useless, or privileged class. If 
Greek, therefore, or any other study claims to enter our curriculum, 
it must be on the ground of some use that it subserves, material 
or spiritual, and only so far as it subserves such use, and just in 
proportion to its importance in this point of view must be its pro- 
portionate weight as an ingredient. 

Is it not plain, therefore, that Greek and Latin as ingredients in 
the liberal education of literary men and philologists — and I 
would be the last to underrate the value of such men — is one 
thing ; Greek and Latin as ingredients in the equally liberal, that 
is, equally symmetrical, education of a vast majority of well edu- 
cated men, must be quite another thing ? My conception of a liber- 
ally educated American people, my conception of an educated 
republic of the future, a republic really educated by institutions of 
its own growth, the product of its own social organization, not 
borrowed from Europe or the Middle Ages, must include liberally 
educated merchants, farmers, manufacturers, mechanics, engineers, 
and all the rest ; and my conception of their liberal education is, 
that inasmuch as it embraces the element of usefulness, it makes 
them good merchants, farmers, mechanics, engineers, just as my 
conception of a liberally educated philologist or lawyer is, that it 
makes him a good philologist or a good lawyer ; and that however 
varied our courses of liberal training may become, they will all agree 
in this, that they will all equally conduce towards making culti- 
vated men and women and good citizens. 

If we do not keep such an ideal as this in view in the manage- 
ment of our public schools, we may as well give up the thought of 
national education altogether, and leave learning to be still, as 
heretofore, the monopoly of privileged classes or privileged profes- 
sions, while the masses shall still content themselves with reading 
their catechisms. But while privilege, and monopoly, and protec- 



8 



tion are fast passing away from all other spheres of human activity, 
and while in England, the very cradle of this exclusive system, they 
are vanishing as the people advance to power, are we to present the 
absurd spectacle of a half-educated republic superstitiously cling- 
ing to the skirts of a system repudiated in the home which gave it 
birth? 

Looking at the subject from this point of view, when we come to 
ask ourselves what ought to be the ingredients which should enter 
into the course of study of Boston High School boys and girls, we 
must first take a general survey of all studies which can possibly be 
pursued by boys and girls at the particular period of their education 
embraced by a High School course, and we must combine these in 
such proportions as best suit the wants of the classes embraced in 
these particular schools, and no others. Now, Mr. Chairman, if I 
were to say briefly that this object might be attained in a rough 
way by exactly inverting the order of studies as at present pursued 
in the Boston High Schools I think I should not be very far wrong. 
At present the Boston Latin School is the most prominent, and in 
its course of study the two subjects Greek and Latin may almost 
be said to swallow up the rest. English and modern languages, 
mathematics and science, and the fine arts, are all subordinate, and 
so subordinate that some of these subjects may practically be said 
to have no place at all. The whole strength of the most prominent 
school in the city may practically be said, to be engaged in prepar- 
ing a mere handful of boys for the narrow and antiquated college 
entrance examination, and the course of study of the whole of the 
school is almost entirely governed by this paramount consideration. 
We turn to the other High School for bo3-s, a school which ought 
equally and in the truest sense to be a school of " liberal " learn- 
ing, and we find it degraded in public estimation almost to the 
level of a " Business College." 

Even if I adopted the vulgar and generally received educational 
theory that there are two distinct styles of education, a "liberal," 
with classics for a foundation, and a " utilitarian," with arithmetic, 
book-keeping, etc., as a basis, I still might argue that having regard 
to the number of recipients, the latter course would for Boston 
public school boys outweigh the former in importance a hundred 



9 



to one ; and that though it might be incumbent on a wealthy city 
like Boston to make proper provision for the preparation of a 
handful of her boys who wish to go to College, yet it is a gross 
abuse to have the course of study of hundreds of others who never 
go there bent from its true direction, and the resources of her 
most expensive school all employed for this subordinate object. 
Even on the most favorable view, the Boston Latin School as at 
present organized has a prominence in her system which cannot 
possibly be justified. For though I should exalt the value of a 
classical over a utilitarian course of study as extravagantly as the 
most bigoted advocate of the classics, yet I think even he will not 
venture to estimate very highly the value of a mere smattering 
of classical learning, which is all that the majority of the boys 
even of the Latin School ever get — that majority, I mean, which 
never reaches college. I say it with all respect to the Head-Mas- 
ter, of whose own classical learning I have a high appreciation. 
It is not true in such a case as this, that, as we say, half a loaf is 
better than no bread. Half a journey, when one never reaches 
one's destination, is sheer waste of time. The instruction of the 
Latin School, if it were ever so good of its kind — and I will not 
enter into that question — is in the main wasted, because it is 
given to recipients who can make no use of it. It is like equip- 
ping pedestrians with spurs, or travellers by land with nicely built 
wherries. 

In putting the case thus I have been assuming the correctness 
of the distinction made by the advocates of classical studies. But 
I have myself no faith whatever in the reality of this antithesis 
between " liberal " and " utilitarian." No course of study deserves 
for a moment to be called liberal that does not directly serve some 
noble use ; and on the other hand the most utilitarian of so-called 
practical studies is not pursued as it should be so long as it is not 
pursued in truly " liberal " ways. The antithesis is a wholly false 
and misleading one. 

If we turn from these erroneous popular views and look at the 

subject in the light of a truer theory, we shall find that there is one 

element of a true symmetrical education represented by the present 

classical course and another by the utilitarian course, and that 

2 



10 

both are equally necessary to our idea of a good education, and 
that both suffer by being divorced from one another. Dividing all 
studies broadly into two divisions, those relating to matter 
and those relating to mind, physical and metaphysical, or by what- 
ever other terms we distinguish the world without from the world 
within us, I find that the classical course represents the latter, but 
represents it at the present day in a wholly antiquated and inad- 
equate manner. Who would deny for a moment the importance of 
language-training as a leading factor in any true scheme of edu- 
cation ? But who at this day can defend the old-fashioned and 
exclusive teaching of Greek and Latin during the period of 
boyhood as the true representatives any longer of language- 
training in a scheme of popular education? They are not 
any longer even the representatives of our higher philology. 
With one of the noblest languages that ever existed for our 
mother-tongue, and with modern languages which are be- 
coming almost a necessity of every-day life, and with boys, the 
majority of whom have but scant time to acquire these, why do we 
persist in wasting some of tbe best years of their lives in the study 
of Greek grammar ? Why not leave it to the scholars who will 
make some good use of it, and ta the literary men of whose train- 
ing it forms a proper part? And on the other hand, why on the 
plea that Latin is taught in the Latin School, deprive the boys of 
the English High School of that knowledge of Latin which is neces- 
sary to them for the right understanding of English ? Grant that 
a few boys will still need to be crammed to* meet the absurd and 
perverse demands of the present college exa.Tiination — let them 
be relegated to a room by themselves and to I'^he hands of a com- 
petent crammer ; but I do not see why the lanii;nage-training of 
the great majority of the Latin School boys should An any material 
respect differ from the language-training of the J'^nglish High 
School boys. Both in my judgment might profitably ^e taught at 
least a minimum of Latin ; both should be taught the.^J mother- 
tongue to some good purpose, though they are not now: both 
should learn French ; both might profitably learn GerL'ian in less 
time than is now wasted on Greek. And all should .engage in 
those ethical studies which belong with language-trainino • They 



11 

should read History and Biography intelligently, not merely be 
crammed with names and dates ; they should understand the laws 
and constitution of their country ; they should learn in scJiool the 
fundamental principles of political economy and social science. 
All these things are either utterly neglected or most inefficiently 
taught ; yet we cannot have such a thing as a sound popular 
education without them. 

If we turn now to the other great division of studies we find 
that it equally suffers from this unnatural divorce. As Nature 
herself has interposed an obstacle to the barren study of words 
by ordaining that before words there shall first come the things 
words stand for, things material as well as things spiritual, and as it 
is found that in the natural development of the youthful mind, the 
study of things material comes before the study of abstractions, and 
must be its foundation, it follows that the study of the elements of 
the natural and physical sciences are not specialties to be shut up 
in a few advanced technical schools, but should form just as much a 
part of all education as language itself, — nay, that language itself 
is utterly barren without them, as witness that stultifying study, Eng- 
lish grammar, as now taught in our primary and grammar schools. 
But, Mr. Chairman, in spite of this fundamental principle of all good 
education, what do you suppose would be the result of an exami- 
nation of the boys now in the Latin School, or of the present fresh- 
man class in Harvard College, in the elements of natural and phys- 
ical science ? I think it would be a very melancholy result indeed ; 
for it is the present practice of our schools to educate candidates 
for college up to the age of seventeen, without any knowledge ot 
the world they live in, on the plea that the college does not require 
it, and they can't spare time from their Greek. And similarly — 
and here I do not speak without some personal experience — an 
examination of the graduates of our High Schools generally, as to 
their knowledge of natural history and natural philosophy as well 
as in regard to their appreciation of English poetry and English 
literature, and the amount of it they had really read to any good 
purpose, would lead to some startling results, and might diminish 
the loudness of that chorus which is continually rising in praise of 
the perfection of our public school system. 



12 

Bat I am not satisfied with this twofold division of knowledge 
into physical and metaphysical. Properly the division is threefold, 
physical, metaphysical and aesthetic ; — Science, Philosophy (includ- 
ing Philology) and Art. We can have no true symmetrical culture 
without the recognition of Art as an essential element in all educa- 
tion that is worthy of the name. Physical science at the present 
day may be left to maintain her own ground ; she needs no help 
when all the strongest tendencies of the age are in favor of giving 
us even an extreme and disproportioned bias in her favor. Our 
task is only to place the study of physical science in its proper 
place in our school curriculum, and I would place its beginnings 
very early. Philosophic studies will never lack support while they 
furnish such appropriate nutriment to the acuteness of the Yankee 
mind. Perhaps the strange reverence our people show for the prac- 
tice of cramming their children with the abstractions of grammar, at 
an age when they are quite incapable of comprehending them, may 
be traced as an inheritance from the training — and it was their 
only philosophic training — which our grandfathers received in the 
hair-splitting mj'steries of Puritan catechisms. And I am inclined 
to trace the kindred superstition in favor of employing classical 
studies as the sole instrument of liberal training to a similar source ; 
that it was because the dim and faint conceptions of Greek art 
thus acquired were the only representatives in their education, of 
aesthetic culture, and the feeling that, spite of all Puritan prejudice, 
the love of art is an element in human nature. The college boy 
did hear of Athens, and Pericles and Phidias, did read, though 
usually to very little purpose, his Homer and his Aeschylus, and did 
come in contact with perhaps a few minds who had read them with 
real advantage. This told at least for something — for how little 
we may know if we ask ourselves what proportion of the graduates 
of Harvard College, in the past, have studied the Greek classics to 
such good purpose as really to have entered into the realm of clas- 
sic art or the spirit of classic poetry.* 

* To attempt to use the nice processes of real classical culture as the 
chief instrument of popular education is much, it seems to me, as though 
one were to employ a Raphael to paint signboards : and hence it comes 
that the classical education of the one Greek mind in every hundred is 



13 



But now that the hatred of Art which sprung from Puritan nar- 
rowness has so died out that we see the most puritanic of sects 
building the costliest of Gothic churches ; when we are beginning to 
adorn our cities at least with bad monuments and worse statues : 
and on the other hand free galleries of painting and sculpture are 
beginning to be collected, to teach us how to make better ; when a 
love for true music has really begun to develop itself among us ; 
now that English as well as classic poetry is thought worthy of 
study, why should not Art be recognized directly as well as indi- 
rectly in our popular education ? Boston has nobly led the way 
by making vocal music a fundamental element in the teaching of 
all her public schools, from the highest to the lowest. I hope to 
see her take another step, and to see good drawing supplant bad, 
and the art of drawing recognized as quite as much a necessity 
and little of a luxury, as the art of writing. There are as many 
born artists on the benches of the humblest primary schools to-day, 
as in the most exclusive private schools of the wealthy ; and on 
the other hand, the art of drawing in its humbler departments 
should be reckoned as much a necessity for the young mechanic as 
the art of reckoning.* 

To do these great subjects justice, Mr. Chairman, would be 
to write a treatise on Education. The main remedy that I 
would suggest for the defects in the course of study of the 
Boston High Schools is the breaking down of the wall that 
separates them. At present the training of the Latin School 
is narrow and pedantic, and of the English High School cold, 
hard, and in a low sense utilitarian, simply for want of an 
ingredient which each might supply the other. It is prepos- 
terous that the Latin School boys should not be taught science ; 

spoiled, while that of the ninety-nine others who need something else is 
perverted; and the classics are trodden in the mire of a superficial teach- 
ing which knows of Greek and Roman Literature nothing but the husk, and 
of the spirit of Greek Art nothing at all. 

* See on the subject of Art as a factor in Education the wise words of 
J. S. Mill, in his St. Andrews address ; and see also a book which deserves 
to be more widely kuowu, " Hiatus, the Void in Modern Education." 
Loudon: Macmillan, 18G9. 



14 



there is no good reason why the English School boys should not 
feel some of the influence which true classical culture gives. Both 
should assuredly learn their mother tongue and really know its 
literature. Both should study modern History and the political 
and social organization of the world they live in. Both should 
feel the liberalizing influence of true Art. In both the true 
period must be found when abstract grammatical studies should be 
begun, and in my judgment it is a very different period from that 
at which they are begun at present. I think that no boy's language- 
training will suflTer if the abstract study of grammar should be 
postponed to the age of fourteen. Let him be left till that age to 
accumulate ideas and to learn language by the right use of it. No 
language ever yet was learned as early or as well as it might be, 
which was begun by the abstract study of its grammar. The reason 
why our children do not learn the use even of their mother tongue 
and know so little of what is written in it, is because their energies 
are consumed in a futile attempt to master bad treatises on its 
grammar in the lower schools ; in precisely the same way that nine- 
tenths of our college boys are made to hate the ancient classics in 
the upper ones.* 

If a fusion were thus made of the ingredients of the two school 
courses, and then if school studies were arranged in what 
all enlightened teachers are beginning to see is the order of 
nature ; and if at the same time there should be made, as we may 
perhaps reasonably hope there will, a change in the character of 
the present college entrance examination, such as will bring it 
into true harmony with the present improved course of college study, 
the conflict which now exists between the character and aims of 
the two schools would almost be done away, and I see not why 
one institution with broad and liberal aims and liberally organized, 
with a man at its head of the broadest and most liberal cul- 

* I have heard it remarked by a business man that in nothing were busi- 
ness men of ability so deficient as in the faculty of expressing their ideas. 
The remark is very just; but if the teaching of English were properly un- 
derstood in our public schools there would be no ground for such com- 
plaint. The English language is precisely what is not taught to any good 
purpose, and the prevalent classical superstitions are I think I'esponsible in 
a great measure for the defect. 



15 

ture that could anywhere be found, would not serve a vastly 
better purpose than two constructed upon the principles of a nar- 
row and antiquated exclusiveness. The wants of the minority of 
boys destined for college, or for the other minority destined for a 
scientific school, need in such a school come into no conflict Avith 
those of what must be always the great majority of pupils ; those, 
namely, who are to enter the walks of active life without enjoying 
the privileges of the higher institutions : while their own privileges 
would be greatly enlarged and their school studies enriched and 
liberalized by coming in contact, even at school, with all the liber- 
alizing influences of an institution in which the foundation for 
higher instruction was being laid by a portion of the pupils. Such a 
school should be distinctly a school, and should never aim at being 
a college — for a college filled with boys is of all institutions the 
most worthless — but it might and would be to boys during the 
period of boyhood all that the college ought to be to them after- 
wards in the period of young manhood. I think that boys would 
not hate such a school. And in such a school courses of study 
might be formed, with great economy of time and labor, to meet all 
the varying wants of different classes of recipients. 

The example of Europe is sometimes quoted in favor of speciali- 
zation, but the educational example of Europe is far more likely to 
mislead than to guide us. We may safely imitate the thorough- 
ness of European teaching — I wish we had begun in our schools 
to have a conception of such thoroughness — but in imitating the 
form of European institutions we shall, nine cases in ten, be only 
copying antiquated errors belonging to social systems radically 
diflerent from our own. The High School education for American 
boys and girls should be of uniform type and quality, and ought 
with minor modifications to prepare them equally well for an Amer- 
ican college or an American scientific school ; or stopping short of 
that, prepare them really well for active American life. The 
college and the scientific school themselves should be only the 
higher classes of the High School. By and by perhaps we shall 
have a university to crown the whole. 

I know what obstacles exist to the realization of any such scheme 
as this. On the one hand are the old-world pedantries which still 



16 



cling abont our college, but which now that its management is 
passing more and more into young and energetic hands we may 
look to see happily removed ; at the other extreme are the lamen- 
table shortcomings and deficiencies of our primary and grammar 
schools. No reform in High School teaching can be successful 
unless it is accompanied by a searching examination into these. 
But this is not a topic pertinent to this occasion. 

I have thus, Mr. Chairman, indicated, at the risk, perhaps, of 
seeming to some little better than a Utopian dreamer, some of 
the directions in which I look to see popular education expand. If 
we are ever to have a popular education worthy of our age and our 
nation. Utopian my words may well seem, if we compare them 
with the present results of our school system. Our school system 
to-day, when we compare the sums lavished upon it, with the ac- 
tual results it produces, seems to me a monument of wasted power. 
I know what an inestimable gain it is even to have it. I know 
that improvement in it must be slow, and must keep pace and can 
never far outstrip the general progress of the community ; but now 
it seems to me to lag behind that progress. And it is an encourag- 
ing sign that as the questions which have so long agitated us, are 
one by one being set at rest, and the noise of conflict is dying in 
the distance, the great permanent interest of education, an inter- 
est on which the very salvation of our free institutions depends, is 
coming so prominently into the foreground. I trust discussion 
will not cease till all the shortcomings of our schools have been 
brought to light, and a remedy found for every evil that afliicts 
them. And in taking measures for the improvement of the partic- 
ular schools you are considering, allow me to hope that you will 
take no step which shall contribute in any degree to the intensify- 
ing of that foolish and unphilosophical antagonism which is some- 
times set up between the claims of Science and the claims of 
Literature, and by so doing give countenance to an illiber- 
ality which is miscalled " liberal " on the one hand, or to an 
empiricism which is miscalled " practical " on the other. 



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